Category: photos

more multi-colored leaves

I’m thinking of changing the name of this blog to “collecting leaves.” Not really. But I do seem to be sharing quite a few leaves. What can I say? It’s fall, and I live in New England. The leaves put on a show, and I am a captive audience member. Who likes to take pictures.

There are fewer colorful leaves on the trees these days, as the chilly winds of November have blown in and cleared most of the trees. Most of these photos were taken over the last few weeks.


Looking up at the layers of red and green oak leaves in my yard.


This plant is pretty as much for the berries as for the leaves. This is the same type of plant whose leaves looks so purple in my other leaf post.


This plant couldn’t make up its mind about what color to wear, so it decided to try out a different look on each leaf.


I like the way these leaves fell in line on the brick sidewalk in Cambridge, MA.


I was drawn to the flame-like colors of this lone leaf at the playground. (I think it’s some kind of maple leaf, but I’m not entirely sure.)


These leaves are in the shrub at a friend’s house. I was quite taken by what looks a bit like a tan line on one of the leaves. (The yellow triangle on an otherwise red leaf looks like it was a result of the leave below it having previously been on top of it.)

indigo oak leaves

A couple of weeks ago, I posted a set of photos showing a range of colors that can be seen in the fall foliage of my neighborhood. My wise and astute friend Magpie chastised me for leaving out part of the spectrum:

Red, orange, yellow, green, BLUE, INDIGO, violet. That is, you’re missing two. :)

It was a tough order, but I think I found some indigo leaves in a photo taken a year ago today. While the leaves in front are of a more expected rusty orange hue, the leaves showing up behind them appear to be a of a deep indigo. (That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it. Maybe.)

fall, falling, fallen

Here are a few photos I took this afternoon in Boston.


Bay State Road in its full fall glory.


A group of students standing among the fallen leaves while a fire alarm went off in their building.


A BU brownstone residence, wearing fashionable fall colors.


A sculpture I’ve never noticed before. (It was on a route I don’t typically walk.)

I had this goal of finding photos each month taken on the same date in a previous year, but my available November 3rd photos of years past fell short of my expectations. (The only 2 I really liked are ones I already posted, and that’s not as much fun.) So instead I am sharing some largely unplanned photos from today. Now I need to get to work lest I fall behind on my work goals.

found faces

The wallpaper in the bathroom of my grandmother’s house was a repeating marbled pattern with blue and white, looking a bit like swirled paint. There were no clear shapes in the swirls, but my eyes found faces in them. Sometimes the faces would scare me a bit when I was little, especially when I’d need to get up to use the bathroom in the night. In my memory I can still make out the faces (2 men with beards, one young and one old, and a young woman) though the house is no longer in our family, and the wallpaper is no doubt gone. (I really can’t imagine that the new owners of the old house would have kept that wallpaper.)

I sometimes still see faces in other places, and I know I am not alone in this.¹ Here are a few of the faces that have appeared to me in the blotchy or peeling paint of various surfaces.


A column in a subway station in Boston.³


A wall on an abandoned building in a town outside Boston.


A wall in Providence, RI.

Do you see the faces in these photos? Do you find faces in other places yourself?

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¹ I have a friend who started a tumblr to share photos of the found faces that she has come across. And Archie has mentioned his own found faces a couple of times.²
² For that matter, the face finding feature of iPhoto has also been known to find faces in other objects.
³ This photo was from November 2, 2012–one year ago today. After finding a photo to post yesterday from November 1st of a previous year, I went poking to see what other photos I had in my library from November 2nd when I looked to find something to post today.⁴
⁴ And the reason that I was looking for something to post today is that I have decided to do NaBloPoMo again this year for November, and post daily for the month. I think this marks the 7th year that I done this.

from deep within the library (friday foto finder: books)

This week’s friday foto finder challenge was to share a photo of books Considering how many books we have in our home (where the number is in the thousands), I have surprisingly few photos of books. I’m sure that books appear in various photos in which the clutter of our house is visible, but I’d rather not go there. Instead, I poked through my photo library to find this photo taken in a library. I took this in 2010, whilst in the swing of my participation in Project 365 (a year of commitment to daily photo-taking). When I did that project, I was playing around with a bunch of monthly themes. When I took this particular one, I was working on incorporating motion blur. Hence the ghostly hand. When I saw that I took this photo 3 years ago to the day, I knew that this was the photo I should post.

To check out more books, pay a visit to your local library. To check out more pictures of books, pay a visit to the fff blog.

full-color fall color

With the gray days of winter looming in the not too distant future, my eyes are savoring the flashy colors of fall. The New England trees are putting on as lovely a show as ever, but the vines and shrubs and even some of the weeds are competing for attention.
red leaves

orange leaves

yellowish leaf

green and red spotted leaves

purple leaves

The first 4 photos are ones I’ve taken with my phone in the last few weeks. The fifth photo is actually one I took with my camera a couple of years ago. I have some more recent photos of this same type of leaves and berries, but the leaves weren’t nearly as purple.

a bowl of morning sunshine (friday foto finder: morning)

We live in the woods, and for most of the day, our house is in shadows. For a few hours each morning, though, the south side of our house is bathed in sunshine. Our breakfast table in particular has been known to catch some of these morning rays.

This week’s friday foto finder challenge is to share a photo for the theme “morning.” This photo is from September of 2010, and it’s actually one of my favorites that I’ve taken. I loved the way the pieces of O cereal arranged themselves in the bowl to best show off their shape in shadow, and how the subtle fluting of the glass bowl resulted in a radial pattern of bright reflected light.

To see what other mornings have been captured and to share your own, pay a visit to the fff blog.

Check out these 6 grate photos

I don’t often like to toot my own horn, but I must say that I have taken some grate photos in my day. A lot of people take some really good photos, but few people will really take the time to take grate photos. How many grate photos do you have in your own photo libary? Here are just 6 of the grate photos I’ve taken in the past few years.

These first 2 grate photos were taken in Sevilla, Spain, in Alcázar. Who could pass up such photogenic grates?

This is not just a grate photo, but an ornate grate photo.

This is more of a humble grate photo: a bathroom drain grate, somewhere in Massachusetts.

And even though I know I once shared 3 photos of storm drains, here are 3 more storm drain grates.

sign and symbol

I often find my eyes drawn to signs, especially the bold and simple graphics of traffic signs. (That is, after all, what they are designed to do.) While some people find that the signs can be detracting from a photo, I actually like the way signs can give a sense of place, especially through the language, text and cultural symbols. In other cases, a sign symbol is used so internationally that rather than reminding us of the locality of a site, we are reminded of our connections.

This is all a rather lofty and overblown introduction to a set of photos I have which include “do not enter” signs. The symbol is a red circle with a horizontal white bar, and it appears on signs the world over. (Or, at the very least, many countries around the world.) Here is I selection I have from 4 continents, taken in 5 different years.

Europe:

In front of the Notre Dame, Paris, France, August, 2007


Sevilla, Spain, September, 2009

Asia:

Macau, August, 2011

North America:

Boston, MA, USA, October, 2010.

South America:

Campinas, Brazil, May, 2008. (Yes, this last one isn’t actually a sign. It’s the light shining through a circular window onto a red carpet in the hallway of the hotel where I was staying. The window is open slightly in the middle, which caused there to be a brighter bar of light in the circle of light. Try to tell me that this doesn’t look like a do not enter symbol.)

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This week’s (okay, last week’s) friday foto finder theme was “circle.” I have oodles of circles in my photo library, but this circular symbol was one that came to mind for the theme.